Language differences mark social differences in many different ways. Certain ways of speaking may be associated with a particular geographic region, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, or age. Since gender is such a socially important characteristic of a person, we shouldn't be surprised to find language differences along gender lines as well.

But as soon as we move beyond a general acknowledgment that men and women might speak differently, things become murky very quickly. Plenty of people have ideas about exactly how men and women use language differently; in the United States, for example, the following opinions are very common:

1. ● Women talk more than men.

2. ● Men are more direct; women are more polite.

3. ● Women speak more correctly than men.

4. ● Men speak more confidently than women.

For linguists, the first step is figuring out whether claims like these are actually true. And if a study does find that men and women speak differently in some way, we're left with a whole new set of questions. For example, suppose you conducted an experiment and found that women were more likely to say um than men. Does this mean that women are more insecure than men? Or that they're more thoughtful and take more time deciding what to say next? How much do the results depend on the design of the experiment? For example, was the data collected in a lab setting, or from a corpus of spontaneous conversation? If it was a lab setting, could the task have biased the results? Were the subjects discussing a topic that men might traditionally be expected to know more about? Were subjects giving monologues, conversing in pairs, or talking in small groups? Were they talking with others of the same sex or the opposite sex?

As we will see, factors like these have a huge effect on how men and women speak. It turns out that there are very few statements of the form ‘Women are X-er than men’ (or vice versa) that are generally true, with the obvious exception of ‘Men tend to have lower voices than women’. Usually, the best we can do is say ‘Women tend to be X-er than men in such-and-such a situation’.